The Blotting-book

Fiction ~ novel/novella
Published August 1908
36,800 words
(First read 22/08/2006)

I need to read this one again to give a full appraisal: my 'review' at the time was very sketchy: 

7/10.  Despite this being a detective story ('crime story' would be more accurate, as precious little visible detecting takes place), I found it highly enjoyable, though it was more for its old-fashioned Edwardian charm than the crime stuff.  Needless to say, I didn't get the crime part once it was explained.

The book is available online here.









THE CRITICS 

The Blotting Book […] by E F Benson, will come as a surprise to readers who have followed the comparatively even tenour of this author's way. The title is non-committal, but brings to mind The Book of Months. The first few pages open up the possibility of a tale in the Dodo vein. But gradually the truth dawns ~ this story is a fresh venture. The affairs of Morris Assheton, who does not attain majority until the age of twenty-five, but gains control of his fortune if he marries after the age of twenty-two, have been left entirely in the hands of Mr Taynton, the family solicitor. It is soon made clear that this apparently honest and genial man has gambled [a]way much of the fortune entrusted to his care. He has every wish to replace the money, for his chief instinct is self-preservation, and is just risking the remnants of the money in a scheme which has every chance of recouping him, when Morris places all in danger by falling in love. Taynton persuades his partner and accomplice, Mills, to slander Morris to Lord Templeton and so prevent an engagement. Shortly after this Mills is murdered, and suspicion points to Morris as his murderer, for he has discovered that he has slandered him, and been greatly enraged. Taynton, who has quarrelled with his partner and has actually killed him, builds up a case so cleverly against Morris that it seems certain he will be convicted. But a trifling slip betrays Taynton. He has forged a threatening letter from Morris to Mills, and blotted it in a blotting book which was not bought until some days after the purported date of the letter. From this the counsel for the defence is able to trace Taynton's movements and clear Morris, but the unhappy solicitor, who, having carried through a successful coup and restored Morris's fortune is now free from the fear that his defalcations will be discovered, escapes the ends of justice by suicide. Mr Benson has built up his story with much ingenuity. The personality of Taynton and the fears which drove him into crime are excellently suggested, and the other characters also fall naturally into their places. An adroit management of detail accounts quite lucidly both for the mystery and its unravelling. Without any of the usual paraphernalia of the book of this class Mr Benson has given us an interesting story. But when he could have given us a much more interesting story on his own lines was The Blotting Book worth the trouble? We are accustomed to the Bensonian manner and resent its absence.

~The Manchester Courier, 05/08/1908

[…] The Blotting Book [...] describes the devilish ingenuity with which a middle-aged barrister, of hitherto spotless reputation, contrived to cast suspicion upon his young client of having committed a murder which was in fact his own work. He was exceeding clever, but, as the event turned out, too clever for his own safety. Skillful detective work discovered the truth by means of the very things he had done to conceal his traces. The story deals chiefly with the crime and the trial; we wish the detection of the criminal had been treated in a less sketchy manner.

~The Outlook, 19/09/1908

There is more genuine workmanship in this slight detective story than in half the toilsome novels of the day, and everyone who can appreciate neat, effective, and finished artistry will enjoy to the full this clever and admirably constructed story. The story is 'the real thing'--life as it is, and crime as it occurs.

~The Daily Telegraph, quoted in endpapers to Juggernaut 

The Blotting Book (1908) is much shorter than any of the previous novels, being in fact a long short story, and it is quite different in style and purpose.  This attractive little book, still available nearly a century later, is a clever piece of detective fiction with the obligatory surprise ending.  It cannot have taken Fred more than a weekend to write ...

 

~Brian Masters in The Life of E. F. Benson, 1991

This little 1908 novel is the story of a murder; rather unexpected from E.F. Benson [...]. Morris Assheton is a young man from a wealthy background; his inheritance is held in trust until his twenty-fifth birthday, unless he marries before that date. The trustees are Mr Taynton and Mr Mills, the family solicitors. Mr Taynton is an agreeable, avuncular sort; charitable, religious and fond of his routines, he contrasts with the much pricklier Mr Mills. Beneath the surface, however, they are more alike, since they have made some ill-advised speculations with Morris's money, hoping for personal profits. When it becomes clear that Morris is in love, and likely to marry, Taynton becomes alarmed. Can he buy enough time to restore Morris's inheritance, ensure his reputation and his prospects for a comfortable retirement?
The novel is set in Brighton [...] and many of the locations are still recognisable, although the murder scene, a quiet path over the downs from Falmer to Brighton, is much less rural nowadays and probably less conducive to violent crime. Benson's book is not really a whodunit ~ it's fairly obvious who the murderer is ~ but it still makes use of typical tools of the genre. Letters, railway timetables, calendars and the eponymous blotting book are all either clues or misdirections. Again, while the book doesn't include the psychological analysis you get in Golden Age detective fiction, it is interested in the boundaries between fantasy, memory and forgetting.
I thought Benson could have done more with the character of Mrs Assheton, Morris's mother ~ she felt very undeveloped to me, particularly in the context of Benson's more famous female characters ~ and the mouth-breathing Superintendent Figgis is a caricature. But the social milieu ~ upper-class luxury on the Edwardian scale ~ is very well evoked, and the book is an enjoyable, if slight, read. [...]

~Tanya Izzard at 20^th Century Vox, 23/12/2011

Ravens' Brood

Fiction ~ novel
Published August? 1934
Approx. 104,000 words
(First read 30/07/2002; second read 28/11/2013)

There's no two ways about it: Ravens' Brood is fun ... in comparison with a lot of the rest of EFB's output.  Okay so it's fun of a rather rarefied, perverse kind, but what the hell.

Set in the second half of the 19th century, it tells the story of a consummately dysfunctional family all living in a heap (well, in a farmhouse, actually) in rural Cornwall: John Pentreath, a part-time religious fanatic and full-time alcoholic; his second wife Mollie, a demented harridan supposedly gifted in folkloric supernatural stuff; his widowed daughter-in-law Nancy, a preening gadabout with an eye for anything in trousers; his stroppy-strapping grandson Dennis; and Mollie's niece Nell.  John and Mollie are estranged, to put it mildly; he lusts after Nancy when he isn't slagging her off for being a jezebel; Mollie lusts after him; Dennis and Nell lust ~ fairly chastely ~ after one another.

Well, obviously, lust is the key.  As Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd say in their introduction to my copy¹, amongst Benson's other stuff Ravens' Brood "stands out like a cromlech in a cornfield ... black magic, sexuality, blasphemy, violence and ecstasy surround and penetrate the plot and characters."
I'm not saying any more: I recommend it.  But don't read it in the expectation of finding light social comedy in it.  Expect, rather, to put it down and say, "Blimey, did the author of Mapp and Lucia really write this?"

¹ Published by Millivres Books, 1993.

P.S. This has only just occurred to me today [28/01/14]: 'Ravens' Brood' isn't the name of the Pentreaths' farmhouse, which doesn't appear to have any particular name; also, to the best of my recollection, Benson never refers to the family as being like a bunch of young ravens; in fact, there's no mention whatsoever of ravens in the book.  There is an owl, though. 

"Rip me bodice, bigfella!"

STOP PRESS! ~ apparently the late Mr Rock Hudson owned a copy of Ravens' Brood ~ LOOK.

OTHER CRITICS

A bit far-fetched perhaps, but this suggests an English counterpart of Tobacco Road*, in its picture of degradation and its atmosphere of hate and depravity and sexual desires, in its ironical contrasts of belief and action, in the sense of its being a world removed from current life. Not a pleasant book, as one can guess by the above. Farm life in Cornwall against which is played out the drama of old John Pentreath's fear of God and love of the flesh and drink, and his growing hatred of his grandson Dennis, [whose] saneness alone lifts the story out of an abyss of degeneracy. A far cry from Benson's usual work.

 

~Kirkus Reviews, no date.  * A 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell.  Never heard of it, I'm afraid.

 

Colin II

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1925
Approx. 118,000 words
(First read 07/07/2002)

In his introduction to the 1994 Millivres edition of Colin II (pictured here), Mr Peter Burton recounts the following anecdote:

'I have just finished Colin,' Lord Halifax wrote to E. F. Benson on October 6th 1923.  'I have been deeply interested in it ~ first rate plot and most exciting.  Colin is a real devil ~ rather he is the devil ~ and yet one is interested in him and something more than interested [...]  Now I am longing for the sequel.  Please be sure to make the next volume as good as the first.'

I shared Lord H's sentiments exactly the last time I read Colin (13/01/2014).  I wonder if he shared the feelings of disappointment I had the last time I read the sequel (17/02/2014)¹ ...

After recapping the yarn of the original Colin's pact with the Divvel, EFB resumes the action a while after the close of the first novel.  Our Colin and his first cousin Violet have been married a couple of years and are the parents of a 14-month-old boy named Dennis.  We're then treated to another recap of everything that happened in Colin.  Here we have Problem No. 1 with Colin II: it is endlessly repetitive ~ if EFB isn't recapping what happened in Colin he's recapping what happened two pages ago.  I fully realize that recapitulation was one of Benson's besetting sins, but here he takes it to absurd and irritating lengths.
Not a lot happens in this section: Colin and Violet bicker; he flits back and forth to Bloody Capri; he reads a book written by his Elizabethan namesake and as a result takes up Satanism; he drives a frankly pretty stupid woman to suicide; and he flirts with his new Italian manservant Nino.  (EFB wearied of the last one so bumped him off.)  You have to hand it to Colin: he is ~ in my opinion ~ by far the most sexually ambiguous of all Benson's heroes.  In the following passage, when he and Nino have gone for a skinnydip in the lake at

Stanier, comes what I think is the most overtly gay bit of stuff in the whole œuvre:

Nino, but for a towel round his loins was still as Nature had made him.  But she had done it very nicely, and as he handed his master his clothes, Colin looked at his shapely shoulders and broad chest.

"You'd make an awfully good bronze statue, Nino," he said.  "You'd look nice in a museum, covered with verdigris, and with an arm and leg missing [...]

But enough of this frivolity ~ on with the show!
"Erm ... can we just back up a bit here, Ewie? ~ did you say 'Colin takes up Satanism'?"  Alas, yes.  This is the second Major Problem with Colin II.  Benson's

fascination with spiritualism I can cope with; his fixation with the god Pan, and attendant malarkey, is just about tolerable; but Satanism? ~ do me a favour.  But luckily he doesn't go overboard with it; his hero gradually loses interest too.  Anyway, Part II shifts the action on a dozen years and largely deals with Colin trying and failing to resist the charms of his adolescent son, who's a facsimile of David Blaize.  This internal struggle is probably the best, and the only believable, stuff in the whole book.  Then it ends.
Huh?  Yes, that's it: Then it ends.

Colin II is poor.  If you've read and enjoyed Colin, you ought to read it, if only to find out How Not To Write A Sequel.


¹ Mr Burton neglects to tell us the follow-up to the anecdote. 

THE CRITICS

The redemption of a gentleman whose soul had sought the devil and found him wanting.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 11/1925

Two years ago appeared Mr. Benson's Colin, with a preface announcing that the narrative would be completed in a later volume. Therefore, says a new note, Colin II must not be regarded as a sequel to Colin, but as the second half of that romance. We are not to take it as an afterthought. It is a tale of demoniac possession. The first Earl of Yardley was a handsome yokel who made Faust's contract with the Devil, became a darling of Queen Elizabeth, and was by her made Earl and endowed with a great estate. His bargain (duly signed in his own blood) is fulfilled. The Devil gives him material prosperity in return for worship and service. The Earl even practices the blasphemous rites of the Black Mass, and plans to raise a chapel to his master's honor. In every generation of his descendants there is found one to renew the bargain. The Colin of our story is the physical and spiritual counterpart of Elizabeth's Colin; radiant in beauty, and utterly committed to the worship of evil.

The first part of Colin told how the youth grew up, married, and by the accidental death of his elder brother, came into his great inheritance. Here the tale is taken up some years later. The young Earl is in his prime. He has great surface charm which he deliberately employs for his purposes. The only thing he fears is love. Very soon after her marriage, his young wife has discovered his true character: or rather, has discovered that there is more in him to fear than to love. Yet she still loves him, sure that there must be some secret goodness in him to have aroused her love. He treats her with mockery, when they are together; to her alone shows himself freely as a servant of hate and evil. Their one child, Dennis, much resembles Colin in body, but has his mother's nature. What ensues is a conflict between Colin's will to hate, and the natural love that stirs in him for his son. In the end the victory goes to love, and we are to suppose that the long devil-service of the house of Yardley is at an end.

A difficult theme for any story-teller, most difficult for one of Mr. Benson's light satiric bent. He says in his prefatory note: "The interval between the appearance of the two books has been longer than I anticipated, for I was not aware of the difficulties that lay ahead." The narrative bears signs of scrupulous and even painful effort. Indeed, this is matter for a Hawthorne or at very least a Powys. Mr. Benson could not fail ignominiously at anything. But he could hardly attempt a much less hopeful enterprise than the present one. The witty purveyor of social comedy cannot muster for this occasion a deep-going fancy or a sustained and stately manner. The story of Colin is, you may say, frank romance; but it is romance which just fails to convey the necessary if fleeting illusion of reality. Colin and Violet and Dennis never get to be more than brilliant figures of the theatre.

~H. W. Boynton in The Saturday Review (US), 10/10/1925

Secret Lives

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1932
Approx. 116,000 words
(First read 20/07/1998)

Paying Guests

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1929
Approx. 100,000 words
(First read 22/10/1995)

Colin

Fiction ~ novel
Published 1923
Approx. 116,000 words
(First read 10/01/1995)

Colin tells the everyday story of the Stanier family, of Stanier, near Rye, in the County of Sussex.  The first section recounts their history from around 1600, when the first Colin Stanier made a Faustian pact with the Devil, to 1900, when our hero the latest Colin is born.  At the start of the second section guess how many years have passed ...  I don't need to spell it out, do I?  Well, inevitably Colin is, on the outside, EFB Type A ~ blond hair, dazzlingly beautiful, wonderfully charming, etc.  Unfortunately, on the inside he's a psychopath¹.
Now it has ere been a Stanier family failing ~ amongst others (psychopathy, alcoholism, misogyny ...) ~ that they're all plain addicted to their family seat, built by the first Colin.  [My apologies, folks ~ I'm going to have to cut this one short, I'm afraid: I'm suffering from acute writer's block over it.]  The remainder of the book deals with Colin's attempts to secure the house for himself, despite his not being entitled to it ~ he has an older twin.

In some respects Colin is actually quite good; in others it suffers from all the customary Bensonian defects.  Among the latter are: the absurdity of the plot; too much repetition and recapping; and the absurdity of the plot.  [Joke.]  Its strengths ~ and these are very rare strengths for EFB books ~ are that the author has wholeheartedly let
rip with Colin Stanier, thrown himself into the character², with the result that, preposterous though he is, he is at least consistent and believable; and, preposterous though the plot might be, it's strangely compelling: I actually put it down eager to read the sequel, for which see Colin II.

¹ Benson never actually uses the term, despite its having been around for nearly 30 years at the time of his writing Colin.
² To the best of my recollection, Benson never actually condemns Colin: he merely tells us what he thinks and describes what he does.  His attitude toward the character is, at best, uncommitted. 

THE CRITICS

A reasonable explanation for many young men of the present day is here provided: Their ancestors sold their souls to the devil and the paper, discounted three centuries ago, has just come due.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 11/1923

Buntingford Jugs

Fiction ~ short story
Published December 1925
Approx. 5,000 words
(First read 27/12/1994) 

Mrs Aylwin is a Benson Type No. 7:

... comely; she could also have been called buxom.  Her age might have been forty-five, but it was fifty, and she found fifty a very pleasant age to be.  She had been a widow for ten years, and these ten years had been the busiest and far the happiest of her life.

Her pleasure is to collect antiques and bric-a-brac, anything from Aubusson carpets to 'ornaments made of shells'.   The sole teeny-weeny fly in this rich, creamy ointment is her friend and fellow aficionado Mr Anthony Coleham who will insist on proposing marriage.  Did I say 'teeny-weeny'?  In fact:

He was a large man, pleasantly furnished with flesh, and filled a chair beautifully.

In an effort to win over his reluctant inamorata, Mr C begins a campaign to buy up every piece of Buntingford ware on the market ~ this happens to be Mrs A's latest collecting fad ~ with a view to making a wedding present of it to her.  The story has its charms, but is promising only up to the dénouement when it sadly comes rather unknotted.  Available in Fine Feathers and Other Stories (1994).

THE CRITICS

 

Brilliant literary talent distinguishes the handsome Christmas Number of the Windsor Magazine, stories of outstanding novelty and interest being contributed by Horace Annesely Vachell, E. F. Benson [etc. etc.]

~The Grantham Journal [UK], 12/12/1925